Molecular & Cellular Mechanisms of Phage Therapy

Phage therapy is the use of bacteriophages for therapeutic purposes. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria with high specificity. Phage therapy was introduced in the early 1900s, but nowadays, with the increase of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, phage therapy has proven to be of great importance and a potential alternative to antibiotics, not only in the field of medicine, but also in veterinary science and agriculture. In our lab, we are interested in understanding the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms of phage therapy inside human cells infected with different pathogens of interest, and we also aim to engineer recombinant bacteriophages with improved properties to be used for future therapy or as rapid diagnostics for bacterial infections. For our research, we use human cell culture and human cell biology methods, microbiology, biochemistry, molecular & synthetic biology and advanced microscopy.